TL;DR: Your "obvious" conclusions about school performance did not stand up to the scientific method.
I also ran for office three times now as a candidate for Minnesota State Representative. As such, I took a keen engineer's interest in the various reform proposals floating around modern politics. The answers I found may shock you.
The fact is that "merit pay for performance" schemes were invalidated by multiple, peer-reviewed scientific studies that attempted to show they worked.
If any organization had a desire to show that merit pay worked, it was the Rand Corporation. Their close ties to military contractors meant that validating a merit pay link would lead to an easy fix to America's achievement gap woes and a solid solution to produce more and better domestic employees for our nation's contractors.
Instead, Rand's study results aimed high for the merit bonus amounts and achieved record poor results. Several other peer-reviewed studies followed soon after and replicated their results. For an analysis of why this is the case, I recommend the book "Drive" by Daniel Pink.
The fact is, if you want to prove that seniority pay doesn't work, don't stop at teachers. Go to your local software shop. See how they appreciate your suggestion that you should pay engineers instead of based upon years of experience and successful projects finished, pay them based upon the number of lines of code produced and how few bugs are created.
See how quickly they crucify you for crippling their company with vanity metrics. Is it not entirely possible that unions can actually be right at times?
I also ran for office three times now as a candidate for Minnesota State Representative. As such, I took a keen engineer's interest in the various reform proposals floating around modern politics. The answers I found may shock you.
The fact is that "merit pay for performance" schemes were invalidated by multiple, peer-reviewed scientific studies that attempted to show they worked.
If any organization had a desire to show that merit pay worked, it was the Rand Corporation. Their close ties to military contractors meant that validating a merit pay link would lead to an easy fix to America's achievement gap woes and a solid solution to produce more and better domestic employees for our nation's contractors.
Instead, Rand's study results aimed high for the merit bonus amounts and achieved record poor results. Several other peer-reviewed studies followed soon after and replicated their results. For an analysis of why this is the case, I recommend the book "Drive" by Daniel Pink.
The fact is, if you want to prove that seniority pay doesn't work, don't stop at teachers. Go to your local software shop. See how they appreciate your suggestion that you should pay engineers instead of based upon years of experience and successful projects finished, pay them based upon the number of lines of code produced and how few bugs are created.
See how quickly they crucify you for crippling their company with vanity metrics. Is it not entirely possible that unions can actually be right at times?